Hi there! Just a quick post to announce a bugfix release of the ABS programming
language: 1.3.2 fixes a simple yet important performance bug dealing
with short-circuit evaluation.

Short-circuiting is the amazing property some languages assign
to boolean operators (eg. && or ||): if the first parameter
in the expression is sufficient to determine the end value of
the expression, the second value is not evaluated at all.

Take a look at this example:

1

false&& sleep(a_really_long_time)

You wouldn’t expect the script to sleep since the first parameter
in the expression is already falsy, thus the expression can never be
truthy.

What about:

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true|| sleep(a_really_long_time)

Same thing, easy peasy.

Even more important, short-circuiting can be really useful in order
to access a property when not sure whether it exists:

You might be wondering what does all of this have to do with ABS:
well, we were supposed to have fully working short-circuiting but,
as it turns out, there was a bug preventing this from working. Your
code would work and run successfully, but it would always evaluate
all the arguments of an expression, even if it short-circuited. In
some cases (like when using short-circuiting for accessing properties)
your code would crash — defeating the whole purpose of short-circuiting.

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